Windows Live Writer makes inserting pictures so easy that many bloggers never need to know what happens behind the “curtain”. Here is a quick look and review of the process.

There are two methods shown in the Insert – Picture menu: “From your computer…” and “From the web…”. A third method is simply to paste an image from the clipboard. The first image here was inserted by the paste, Ctrl+V, method.

Just so I can demonstrate what happens, here is a picture inserted by the “From your computer…” route.

In Live Writer the images can be positioned, scaled, framed, even artistically modified and a watermark can be added. It all looks just as it will appear in the published post.

When you click the Source tab (near bottom left of the Live Writer window) you see something like this:

There are no images there, just text. Actually HTML code. The references to the pictures, excerpted from the code, are like this:

… href=”$image[5].png” … src=”$image_thumb[3].png” …

… href=”$mothA15[3].jpg” … src=”$mothA15_thumb.jpg” …

… href=”$LWB-110813-02[5].png” … src=”$LWB-110813-02_thumb[3].png” …

No such files exist on my computer, I do have a “mothA15.jpg” and a “LWB-110813-02.jpg” but these designations in the code are strange, there is the extra dollar-sign, $, and the bracketed numbers, as well as the “_thumb” entries, what is that all about? Well, this is how Live Writer keeps track of the images – these actually are saved on the computer.

When the post is published these images are uploaded to the blog site folder for storing images. To demonstrate where they go, I did a “Post draft to blog” command (Home – Publish group) of this post. This being a WordPress blog, I then opened my WordPress Dashboard and opened Posts. The draft was listed on top, of course. I opened it in Edit mode and clicked the HTML tab. There was the code, except now the references to the images were like this: